Flunking file-swappers: inside the RIAA?s anti-P2P machine

The RIAA has two weapons in its arsenal when it comes to illicit P2P use on …

Last week, at an EDUCAUSE gathering of campus IT administrators from around the country, one of the topics on everyone's mind was the recent spike in copyright infringement notices from the RIAA over the last month. When one speaker asked how many schools had seen a spike, most hands in the room went up. But how does the RIAA work its diabolical letter-generating magic? In two different ways, it turns out, depending on whether a DMCA takedown notice is issued or whether one of the dreaded "pre-litigation letters" sallies forth to do battle with some college kid's wallet.

In a new post to an EDUCAUSE listserv, EDUCAUSE VP Mark Luker lays out the two different approaches after conversations with the RIAA. The recording industry made clear that it generates DMCA takedown notices based simply on the contents of a user's shared folder. MediaSentry, which does the investigative work for the RIAA, does not actually download these files since it is not attempting to prove that an illicit distribution of its copyrighted content has occurred. Instead, it simply notes the existence of such a file and requests that it be taken down. These requests are then passed to the schools, which implement their own disciplinary procedures; students are not threatened with lawsuits.

The second sort of notice is far more serious. These are the pre-litigation notices, officially called "Early Settlement Letters," that target specific students and announce plans to pursue a lawsuit. Students can choose to settle without ever going to court by contacting the RIAA's special settlement center; credit cards are even supported for added convenience, likely teaching students an expensive lesson about both copyright infringement and the horrors of credit card debt. These pre-litigation notices are based on actual downloads by MediaSentry, though whether these industry-approved downloads count as an illicit distribution to the "public" remains in doubt.

The distinction between the two letters is important to understand because certain P2P mitigation regimes will only affect one type of letter. EDUCAUSE notes that Audible Magic's music-matching gear only scans files actually transferred across the network, so schools could still invest a pretty penny into such systems but remain inundated with DMCA takedowns (since these don't necessarily require any file transmissions from the students in question).

The distinction also helps to explain why some IT staffers, in attempting to verify the RIAA's claims by checking the logs (EDUCAUSE calls this a "sanity check"), are coming up empty when searching for outgoing transmissions from the IP address in question at the time in question.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, apparently privy to the same briefing at RIAA headquarters, has a few additional notes on the entire procedure. Most interesting is that MediaSentry doesn't use any special gear or software, it simply runs searches on LimeWire and other P2P apps one after another, looking for bands and songs controlled by RIAA member companies. When a hit is found, the IP address is recorded, a reverse DNS lookup is done, and only addresses that resolve to college campuses are forwarded to the RIAA to generate a letter. The process is automated by scripting software, of course, but it doesn't sound especially high-tech.

But the best bits of the Chronicle writeup aren't the technical details; they're the human ones. Consider these two quotes:

"The demonstration was given by an RIAA employee who would speak only on condition of anonymity because of concern that he would receive hate e-mail."

"Before sending out the pre-litigation settlement letters, MediaSentry investigators always download music files believed to be infringing on licensed songs. Live human beings then listen to those songs to verify that the files are infringing."

The RIAA's legal campaign is sometimes hated, sometimes feared, but the people behind it are rarely pitied. But not being able to give your name for fear of the hate mail or spending your days beneath the headphones listening to the bad pop music traded by college students... it's sad, really. But what are a few more human casualties in the war on collegiate file-swapping?